I sing of arms and of a man displaced by Fate, the first to leave the coast of Troy for Italy and its Lavinian shores: the power of the gods and vicious wrath of unforgetting Juno hurled him far across the sea and lands, and he endured still further pain in war - the price to found his city and install his gods in Latium. The Latin race, the Alban lords, the walls of soaring Rome: from here they all began.
Virgil, Aeneid (Book 1, 1-10).
Homer's Odyssey is everywhere right now, thanks to Christopher Nolan's entertaining - if also problematic - portrayal of it on screen this summer. I first read the Odyssey in high school; the Iliad later. Until this week, however, I had never actually read Virgil's venerable Latin classic, the Aeneid, his late first-century B.C. account of the Trojan prince Aeneas' escape from the calamity of the Trojan War's end and his Odyssey-like journey across the Mediterranean, harassed by the vengeful goddess Juno, until he eventually settled in Italy and became the putative ancestor of the Romans. Being about Rome and having been written in Latin, Virgil's Aeneid may have been the most influential literary work of all the Greek and Roman classics.I knew about the Aeneid, of course, but it remained among the many classics which one ought to know something about without ever actually getting around to reading it.
Once upon a time, however, the world was very different, and the Virgil-Homer hierarchy was reversed. As Bryn Mawr classicist Catherine Conybeare has noted, Latin-speaking Roman schoolboys "learned to read by sounding out syllables from the Aeneid. The Aeneid taught them to scan lines of poetry, and moreover to interpret them. Children learned swaths of the poem by heart. Later on boys would begin the rhetorical studies on which an imperial career was based by entering imaginatively into the characters from the Aeneid and composing appropriate speeches for them to declaim at crucial moments of choice or crisis. Wherever in the empire their careers took these young men, an apposite quotation form the Aeneid thrown casually into their conversation or their correspondence would immediately establish them as a member of the educated ruling classes" [Augustine the African, Norton, Liveright, 2025, p. 5].
Having been energized by all the renewed classical hype engendered by Christopher Nolan's on-screen Odyssey this summer, I have - with somewhat surprising enthusiasm - returned to the sources, the Iliad itself and the Odyssey itself (albeit in English translations), and I now find myself emboldened to tackle Virgil's Roman-centric sequel - in the 2025 translation by Scott McGil and Susannah Wright (Norton Liveright), which includes a superb Introduction by the famous Homeric translator Emily Wilson. (All references here are to that translation.)
The Aeneid - 9,896 Latin lines written (like the Iliad and the Odyssey) in dactylic hexameter - was composed by Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) in the last decade of his life (29-29 B.C.) It is thought that the poem may have actually been left unfinished - as evidenced by the presence of several metrically incomplete verses. Virgil's hero, Aeneas, was already familiar from the Iliad as a Trojan prince and a son of Aphrodite (Venus). The first six of Aeneid's twelve books recount the story of Aeneas' Odyssey-like wandering from Troy to Italy, including in Book 2 Virgil's violent account of the actual fall of Troy, a grief no words can tell (2.4), returning the reader to the blood-soaked, heroic world of the Iliad. The remaining six books recount the Trojans' ultimately victorious Iliad-like wars with the Latins, with whose name and language Aeneas and his Trojan followers have been destined to assimilate. The poem served as a founding myth for the city (and later empire) of Rome, connecting Rome back to the heroic age of Troy and promoting the legitimate rule of the Julian dynasty as the descendants of the goddess Venus and the Trojan hero Aeneas. Already, almost at the poem's beginning, notwithstanding Juno's hostility, Jupiter had promised Venus, Aeneas' mother, regarding his descendants: I set no bounds of space or time for them; I have bestowed dominion without end (1. 332-333).
Juno's hostility, however, is a constant reminder that with Virgil (as with Homer, who had Odysseus forever afflicted by Poseidon's wrath), we are in a very different moral universe from our own. We are in a world of capricious gods and goddesses, who exercise control over human affairs in unpredictable ways and who can sometimes be appeased but sometimes not. As Virgil himself expressed it, what offense, what painful insult led the queen of heaven to drive a man renowned for faithfulness through such ordeals, such endless miseries? Do gods have so much anger in their hearts? (1. 11-15).
Nor are the gods alone when it comes to complex and intense emotions!
"Hector fights for his country. Achilles fights only for himself." So said Agamemnon in the 2004 film Troy. As Hector's tear-inducing farewell conversation with his wife in Book 6 of the actual Iliad illustrates, Hector was not immune from Bronze Age heroic vainglory akin to that of Achilles, but neither was the movie version of Agamemnon all that wrong in the important personal differences which Agamemnon noted between the two heroes. Ascribed ancestry aside, this was undoubtedly another reason why the civic-minded Romans would have wanted to identify themselves with the Trojan cause and would have taken pride in their supposed Trojan ancestor, Aeneas. And, unlike Achilles or Odysseus, Aeneas' most outstanding trait is not some manifestation of physical or mental superiority but his piety. This too would appeal strongly to the Romans, because piety highlights the hero's relationship with and devotion to both the gods and the hero's human communities (e.g., family and city). Unlike the Greeks', the unique artistry of the Romans was political - as foretold by the ghost of Aeneas' father, Anchises, in Book 6: Remember, Roman, to rule the world (for these will be your arts) and to impose on it an ordered peace (6. 1023-1026). Of course, it would be precisely this passage - reimagined as arrogance - which Saint Augustine would later directly attack in his de-mystification of Roman imperialism in his monumental anti-Aeneid, The City of God!
There is, of course, quite a cost in human terms to dominion without end, to which the women characters - whether Andromache in the Iliad or Dido in the Aeneid - are especially poignant witnesses. Interestingly, the Iliad, dominated by Achilles' seemingly unquenchable rage and filled with destructive battle-after-battle, ends on a humane note as an angry Achilles shows mercy to Priam, Hector's grieving father. In the Aeneid, however, Aeneas in his fury considers but then rejects Turnus' plea for mercy, and the poem ends in violent death - a fitting foreshadowing, perhaps, of the enormous human cost to be exacted in producing the Augustan pax romana, the high price to be paid for empire. He burned with anger as he plunged his blade into his rival's breast. The chill of death made Turnus' limbs go slack, and with a groan, his spirit fled in protest to the shades (12. 1142-1145).
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